What Do Blind People Dream?

How do the blind dream images, ideas, emotions, and sensations? A dream, whether it's short or long, whether you can or can't remember it, everyone dreams. But what do people that can't see see in their dreams and how do they dream to start?

Facts About Dreams

Here are some facts about dreams:

  • Dreams are usually fantastic, with people, places, events, and objects tending to merge into one another in a confusing manner.
  • The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety and other negative emotions, which are much more prevalent than positive ones.
  • The vast majority of people dream in color, but if you watched monochrome television growing up, you're more likely to dream in black and white.
  • Only around 10% of dreams are sexual in nature, although the percentage is higher among adolescents.

Dreams of the Blind

But what about individuals that cannot see, individuals who have been blind since birth (congenital blindness) or very early in childhood? Usually, they have no images in their dreams; however, this varies from person to person. Some studies conclude that if a person loses his or her sight before the age of 5, they will almost never have images in dreams. Interestingly enough, the congenitally blind have cortical areas responsible for visual representations activated during dreaming. These activations are manifested instead through the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

For those who go blind in middle childhood, it seems that the situation can go either way; dreams are reported as both visual and non-visual. At times, initially after blindness, visuals may be present but then slowly fade or disappear altogether after time. Those who become blind later in life continue to experience some images in their dreams.

Dream Content of the Blind

In a study published in February 2014 by a group of Danish researchers in sleep medicine, it was found that:

  • 18% of the blind participants, both congenital and later onset, reported tasting in at least one dream.
  • 30% of the blind reported smelling in at least one dream.
  • 70% of the blind reported touch sensations.
  • 86% of the blind reported hearing.

When looking solely at the congenitally blind group, 26% tasted, 40% smelled, 67% touched, and 93% heard in at least one dream. Despite the sensory differences, the content of dreams is not much different in the blind and the sighted; both groups reported about the same number of social interactions, successes, and failures in their dreams.

Nightmares

However, the blind group had a lot more nightmares (25%) compared with only 7% of the later onset blind group and 6% of the cited control group. This difference held even after the research is controlled for sleep quality, which is generally poorer among the blind. This increased number of nightmares could be because of evolution, when nightmares can be seen as threat simulations as a mentally harmless way that the human mind can adapt to the threats of life.

A recurring theme in the dreams of many blind people, congenital or not, is transportation, possibly because that is something that often gives them trouble in real life. This makes sense because for the blind, the most frequently reported nightmares included events such as getting lost, being hit by an unseen car, falling into manholes, and losing their guide dog – a greater number of occurring threats than the sighted in everyday life, hence the increased number of nightmares.

Dream Recollection and Representation

Although the other senses take over in dreams for the blind, especially for the congenitally blind, a 2003 study conducted in the EEG/sleep Laboratory Centro de Estudos Egas Moniz, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, in Portugal, showed that when it came to visually recalling and recreating a dream, there was no statistical difference between the blind and the sighted.

When asked to create a graphical representation of a dream in the form of a drawing, blind subjects were able to create drawings of dream scenes that accurately represented the generic scenes they had verbally described earlier. No statistical differences were found between the groups in both complexity and content of the drawings. In both groups, landscapes are present in 70% of the drawings, objects in 90%, and human figures in 10%.

Conclusion

So what does this mean? Although the blind can't see with their eyes as the sighted can, they see in their dreams through other heightened senses, and sometimes can even see images if not congenitally blind. They dream about the same things as the sighted, although they have nightmares more frequently. And the most surprising finding: the lack of the sense of sight in dreams does not hinder the blind from describing nor representing their dreams graphically with accuracy and complexity, being statistically the same as the sighted control group.

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